There isn’t actually a chip shortage methinks - more like a shortage of intelligence and common sense.
It is the older lines, making voltage regulators and power management chips, making it difficult to put the whole solution together.
While some of these chips could be redesigned to use new processes, or older designs with larger format fabs brought up to accommodate demand, both of these situations are short-term and thus no one wants to invest.
Then, for any entity that successfully moves from one supplier with one process size to a different one...they are creating more demand there, which could precipitate shortages now in that space. Then, there's peripheral effects. Like perhaps some of the suppliers are liking the new per-unit margins during the shortage, and won't just let it all go when demand/supply normalizes.
it's tough to program your way out of needing a regulator or amplifier or something.
We are just coming off the highs of using GPUs to generate mountains of useless money that was used to effect massive scams. But even all that is still going on.
And free market capitalism is supposed to result in efficient resource allocation? What are we even doing, trying to accelerate the heat death of the universe? Entropy not increasing fast enough for us?
Like… maybe we wouldn’t need so much silicon if we were using it a little better. Might as well just store everything in linked lists. Who even cares about data structures anymore?
Used to be that you could program a computer with everything in your head. Then you had to use the Internet, a global network of information, as a resource because it got so complicated. Now it's so bad that you also need an artificial intelligence that can interpret the information on the Internet. All so we can, what... serve more ads? Invade more privacy? Wage more wars? Earn more profits? What are we even doing with this technology?
Even that is incorrect, or, to be precise, correct that it is indeed Python - however it is that part of Python which is actually written in C/C++ and highly optimized.
There is a reason why Python is used for data science, ML and similar. It is both convenient to use and fast, thanks to numpy and other libraries.
I realize that the point of your post is something else entirely, but no need to pick on Python. It's actually quite performant in areas where this is needed.
But no, here we are with the worst of all worlds. Maybe that day will come, but the long-term, industry-wide trend is more silicon needed to accomplish roughly the same end goal. We're playing the same games, writing the same excel docs, browsing the same webpages, but now it takes more energy, more silicon, more transistors... call me skeptical we're going to add all this LLM tech on top of the already towering tech stack, and it will result in a reduction of needed silicon because we've simplified the whole thing considerably.
> It is both convenient to use and fast, thanks to numpy and other libraries. I realize that the point of your post is something else entirely, but no need to pick on Python.
My point though, was that the fast and convenient is only interesting when it comes together as a package. Other languages are faster, even granting that some Python packages are written in native code. But if the new interface to Python is an LLM, then "Python" as a language doesn't have a place anymore; it'll be more convenient to emit code in other languages.